Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Harry Reid: A Good Majority Leader (when he has some votes to work with)

Refuses to knuckle under to pointless Republican bullying.

I don't intend to turn this blog into full-throated apology for Harry Reid's performance between 2006 and, say, yesterday, but people need to realize that the Senate is not well suited to have a Majority Leader do anything when he has a 50-49 majority plus Joe Lieberman being a douchebag. Bill Frist had a hard time with a 55-45 majority. Having a 59-41 majority in the 111th Congress will make things a lot easier.

(link is NSFW, maybe, depending on your standards).

5 comments:

Neil Sinhababu said...

If you see reason for full-throated Reid apologia, go for it, man.

I was watching the dude intensely through the whole Supreme Court fight of 2006. He didn't make a single bad move, and if Biden and DiFi hadn't screwed stuff up in Judiciary we might've been able to block Alito. Heck, he was the guy who got us the Harriet Miers nomination.

Anonymous said...

About time that someone stood up for Reid. He makes mistakes, but lots of people have completely unrealistic expectations about the Senate.

I'm not really sure whether he does a good job or not on balance because lots of things about the Senate are really opaque unless you understand the place a lot better than I do (or than many of his critics do). That said, with 59 votes, he absolutely HAS to move a lot of important legislation this year, or, at least very least, make Republicans vote against a lot of popular stuff that we don't quite have the votes for yet.

corvus said...

Also, doesn't the majority leader of the Senate not really have all that much power? I mean, it seems like the Speaker is invested with a whole bunch of extraordinary powers concerning blocking legislation, but the Leaders of both parties just kind of serve as figureheads for the parties. Reid is more the spokesman and meeting-runner than executive. His job is even more cat-herding (and bigger cats) than Pelosi's.

Am I wrong?

BruceMcF said...

Shouldn't the link be to CongressMatters rather than the Great Orange Satan MotherBlog?

CongressMatters needs the traffic, and is far more compatible with the tenor of Donkeylicious than the GOSMB.

Neil Sinhababu said...

I think I'll add Congress Matters to the blogroll. It Deserves More Attention.